How One Couple Turned a “Toxic Corner” of Cleveland into a Development Hotbed

Newlyweds Marika Shioiri-Clark and Graham Veysey, photographed with Gracey, in their apartment in the Ohio City Firehouse.

Photograph by Peter Larson.

Four years ago, Graham Veysey and Marika Shioiri-Clark set out to develop and cultivate their ideal neighborhood. “I wanted to go to a place where I could sink roots down and make an impact,” says 33-year-old Veysey, who owns a video-production company. They bought a former firehouse built in 1854, complete with three poles, and turned one of the old fire-truck bays into their living area. The second floor is now a collection of workspaces, including Veysey’s office and Shioiri-Clark’s design studio. The couple christened their once desolate area of Cleveland Hingetown (it’s the connector of three sections of town: the Warehouse District, the Ohio City Market District, and Gordon Square) and began changing the landscape. They added splashes of public art, flower baskets, and bike racks to the cracked concrete corners and renovated the decrepit building across the street, bringing in eight retail spaces and seven apartments—including a full-time Airbnb unit they use to show off the neighborhood. “If you have an idea, people here say, ‘O.K., let’s try it.’ It’s affordable and accessible, so you can do it and people support you,” says Shioiri-Clark, a 31-year-old architectural designer. “It’s really exciting to feel like I can be part of a small movement.”

Today, the drug dealers and prostitutes that once trafficked the area have been supplanted by millennials, moms and dads pushing baby strollers, and empty-nesters. They come to visit places like Rising Star, a third-wave coffee company started by a former Lockheed Martin executive, and Cleveland Tea Revival, a tea shop run by Michael George and Amber Pompeii, a young couple who boomeranged back from Seattle.

Akron art collectors Fred and Laura Ruth Bidwell bought a vacant former trolley transformer station across from the firehouse and renovated it into a 7,500-square-foot contemporary-art space aptly named Transformer Station. “This place, which was a nowhere, toxic corner, has become a destination,” says Fred Bidwell.

Hingetown is now a development hotbed, with more than $70 million in new projects planned in the roughly eight-square-block area. Veysey and Shioiri-Clark credit this to the authentic sense of neighborhood vitality and the fact that residents have taken ownership. “We knew when we went into it that it would be as much a community building project as a real-estate project,” says Shioiri-Clark.